strategy+business

ISSUE 60 AUTUMN 2010

Charles Landry Knows

What Makes Cities Great:
Distinction, Variety,
and Flow
From Amsterdam to Adelaide, this unorthodox thinker has divined
the connections between economic prosperity and creative achievement,
and their implications for the future of the city.

BY SALLY HELGESEN

REPRINT 10306
features the creative mind

1
CHARLES LANDRY
Knows What Make
Distinction, Variety,
From Amsterdam to Adelaide, this unorthodox
thinker has divined the connections between
economic prosperity and creative achievement,
and their implications for the future of the city.
features the creative mind Photographs by Julian Anderson
2

by Sally Helgesen
s Cities Great:
and Flow
 Sally Helgesen Previous pages:
sally@sallyhelgesen.com Charles Landry in London.
is an author and leadership
development consultant. Her
books include Thriving in 24/7:
Six Strategies for Taming the
New World of Work (Free
Press, 2001) and The Female
Vision: Women’s Real Power at
Work (with Julie Johnson;
Berrett-Koehler, 2010).
What sustains great organizations over time?
Great talent. And what do talented people want? Most
features the creative mind
want influence, money, personal fulfillment, and the
chance to make a difference. But more and more, tal-
ented people also want a great place to live.
The answer seems obvious, but the phenomenon is
fairly recent. In the past, the attractions of working for
the right company often trumped the desire to live in
a great place. No longer: A landmark study by the
Chicago-based CEOs for Cities released in 2008 found
that 64 percent of highly mobile global knowledge
workers said they were more likely to choose a job be-
cause of where an organization was located than because
of the organization itself.
The reason is not surprising. Talented knowledge
workers — people who have choices — know that com-
panies can no longer guarantee their own survival, much
3
less offer their employees a safe harbor in an unpre-
dictable economic environment. To secure a prosperous
future, individuals need to put themselves in settings
that enhance their ability to build both the relationships
and the skills they will need to support themselves over
the course of a lifetime. Less dependent on companies
than they were in the past, knowledge workers have
increasingly come to recognize that putting place first
works to their advantage.
Business leaders have been slow to recognize the key
role of place in attracting talent and stirring its innova-
tive potential. As a result, many companies continue to
over-focus on building internal capacity rather than
seeking to strengthen the regions to which they need to
attract skilled people. Given the shift in what top people
are looking for, leaders who follow the conventional
strategy may end up shortchanging themselves in the
talent sweepstakes and also undermining the long-term
economic viability of their resource base.
But what exactly constitutes a great place in today’s
environment? What precisely is it that 64 percent of
knowledge workers seek? Charles Landry, an indepen-
dent consultant, writer, and thinker based outside
Oxford, England, has spent his life considering the com-
plex blend of elements that most effectively draw tal-
ented people to specific cities and regions. Landry also
studies the myriad ways in which place can provide the
emotional and sensory stimulation required to stir cre-
ative thought and translate it into action.
As founder of the consultancy Comedia, and as an
author and peripatetic speaker, Landry works with
regional authorities and private-sector clients around the
globe to identify and build the systems of support that
knowledge-based global capitalism both demands and
rewards. He sees his mission as nothing less than to help
develop the physical and civic infrastructures that can
powerfully support innovative practice.
Landry’s encyclopedic books, such as The Art of
City-Making (Earthscan Publications, 2006), The
Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (2nd ed.,
Earthscan Publications, 2008), and The Intercultural
City: Planning for Diversity Advantage (with Phil Wood;
Earthscan Publications, 2008), offer powerful insights
about the role place can play in attracting, retaining,
developing, and inspiring world-class people in today’s
fast-changing global business environment. The highly
strategy + business issue 60
original and often spellbinding lectures that Landry
delivers in venues ranging from Bali to Abu Dhabi to
Bilbao provide a crash course for business and civic lead-
ers seeking to create a regional advantage. He shows
them how to align an understanding of what spurs cre-
ative effort with relentlessly practical insights about what
talented people consider when choosing where to live —
the down and dirty basics of transport, livability, and
connection to the global grid.
Landry’s own unique career trajectory exemplifies
the practices he advocates. Starting in his 20s, he pio-
neered intellectual entrepreneurship, making a living by
moving unexpected and highly original contributions
from the margins into the mainstream. Some of the
practices for which he is a passionate advocate are inno-
vation rooted in a strong European intellectual tradi-
tion, wealth creation balanced with social cohesion, and
local distinction reconciled with a global context. By
pursuing his self-invented path and ignoring the con-
ventional boundaries that separate culture and econom-
ics, Landry has developed a fresh and powerful under-
standing of what spurs talent to be creative.
The Intellectual Wildcatter
Landry was born in bleak postwar London in 1948 to
parents who had fled Germany in the 1930s. His father,
Harald Landry, had been a professional philosopher, a
cohort of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche;
his political activities against the Nazi regime made stay-
ing in his native Berlin dangerous. Although Harald
managed to secure asylum in Britain, he came under
suspicion as a German national, Britons being skeptical
about how to regard refugees from that country who
were not Jewish. When the war came, he was sent to an
internment camp as a suspected spy, an experience that
his son believes broke his spirit.
After Harald Landry’s release, the family struggled
in north London, supported primarily by Landry’s
mother, who ran a toy factory. Then in the early 1960s,
the German government began offering restitution to
citizens forced to flee, and the family decided to return
to its home country to stake a claim. Charles went from
being a German boy in English schools to being an
English boy in German schools, which gave him both
the outsider’s perspective that a writer’s life seems to
require and a deeply pan-European outlook. This was
intensified when his parents decided to relocate to Italy,
to a seaside village near Genoa, where the restitution
paid out in strong German marks would go further.
Charles matriculated at Johns Hopkins University’s
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
in Bologna, where he would also do his postgraduate
work in political economy. Inspired by his polyglot
experience, he developed an intellectual curiosity about
how Europe was changing and what the political and
economic future of a united continent might look like.
features the creative mind
Living in Bologna and traveling around the great central
Italian cities of the Renaissance also stirred in him a pas-
sion for culture and aesthetics — art, architecture, great
music, and other monuments of creative achievement.
But this passion seemed at the time a side interest, un-
related to the field of economic development upon
which his academic course work focused.
While in Bologna, Landry served as an assistant to
Robert Skidelsky, the economic historian whose biogra-
phy of John Maynard Keynes is recognized as a classic.
Skidelsky hired him to help identify the emerging prob-
lems of postindustrial society, a charge that by Landry’s
account mostly involved “arguing with the master —
arguing in the best sense — while also playing a lot of
chess.” Though a skilled player, Landry came to dislike
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the game, which struck him as epitomizing a world view
that admitted only black and white, whereas his interest
was in exploring the subtleties of gray. In a similar vein,
he began to develop a belief that economic challenges
could not be addressed except in a cultural context — a
belief with which Skidelsky’s great biographical subject
would certainly have concurred.
Landry’s work with Skidelsky brought him unusual
prominence as a graduate student, and upon receiving
his degree he was hired by Lord Kennet, one of Britain’s
envoys to the European Economic Community (EEC),
now the European Union. The year was 1973. Kennet
wanted him to coordinate a massive study aimed at
determining what Europe would look like 30 years in
the future. The opportunity put Landry on the fast track
to influence and success, and also landed him a com-
fortable sinecure in Brussels.
 Landry’s tenure in the EEC convinced
him that “the single biggest problem in the
world is not finding great ideas
but getting great ideas to move, to flow.”
But Landry, still in his mid-20s, quickly perceived
that life in a structured bureaucracy would not suit his
features the creative mind
restless imagination. “The job was extremely well paid,
very prestigious, with a huge expense account,” he says,
“but I felt trapped in the layers of the organization.
Every idea I had seemed to get reduced or compromised.
I knew if I stayed inside that kind of structure I would
be frustrated for the rest of my life.”
He was particularly frustrated by the distinction the
EEC made between economic and cultural activity.
Influenced by the rich entrepreneurial history of the
towns around Bologna, and deeply inspired by the cul-
tural ferment that dominated university towns in the
early 1970s, Landry was coming to view economic pros-
perity and creative achievement as strongly linked.
Although excited by what he thought a more integrated
Europe could do in fostering open markets, Landry also
5
believed that markets were social and cultural vehicles
that offered people a means of creative expression, which
he saw as the true engine of prosperity. He longed for
work that would enable him to connect the dots
between economic development and creativity, a pursuit
the EEC then had no structure to support.
Deciding to follow his own path, he horrified
friends and family by not accepting a new contract with
the EEC when it was offered. As one of his classmates
at Johns Hopkins, American journalist Elizabeth Bailey,
observes, “It was the early ’70s, when there wasn’t much
potential in being a free agent. But even then Charles
was a wildcatter, an intellectual entrepreneur. I also
think his passion to explore the role of creativity in cities
and regions evolved because creative freedom was so
important in his own life.”
Landry’s tenure in the EEC convinced him, he later
recalled, that “the single biggest problem in the world is
not finding great ideas but getting great ideas to move,
to flow. New ideas need decentralized channels so that
people who might implement them can find them and
create the kind of systems needed to put them into prac-
tice. In the early ’70s, there were lots of brilliant ideas,
but they had no way to capture the world’s attention or
move from the margins into the mainstream. So every-
thing felt kind of stuck.”
Trying to address this problem, Landry helped to
found a distribution service for the many innovative
small journals, studies, and manifestos that were being
published in the U.K. and Europe at the time. He par-
ticularly sought out work that blurred boundaries
between culture, economy, and governance. His goal
was to disseminate the commodity he loved and under-
stood best — new ideas — with maximum exposure
and minimal filtering. His interest in distribution was
fueled by the same kind of “open source” enthusiasm
then spurring proponents of computers as community
billboards in Berkeley and Boston. Landry stuck with
his venture through the ’70s, and although it would ulti-
mately prove a detour for him, it served his evolution by
giving him hands-on experience in creating a market for
new ideas. It also put him in touch with cultural inno-
vators across Europe, in whose work he saw untapped
economic potential. At the end of the decade, he decid-
ed he wanted to exercise the practical talents he had
developed by helping cities and regions apply the kind
strategy + business issue 60
of creative ideas he had been involved in distributing.
A Platform and a Haven
In 1978, Landry applied for a grant from a British foun-
dation focused on strengthening regional and commu-
nity development. With money in hand, he founded
Comedia, a cultural planning consultancy that would
provide him with a platform for writing, consulting, and
setting up collaborative ventures over the next 30 years.
At the same time, he moved to the Cotswolds area of
west-central England. Magnificently set with mellow
stone churches, tightly hedged fields, fantastical topiary,
and roaming sheep, the Cotswolds region had histori-
cally been a center of industry and commerce, but it fell
by the wayside during the Industrial Revolution. More
recently, the region has undergone a resurgence, offering
global citizens who can work where they please a pas-
toral experience of deeply rooted community life, along
with close proximity to London and Bristol and easy
access to Heathrow. By every criterion, it qualifies as a
great place to live.
When he’s home, Landry works from the busy
kitchen office of a rambling 17th-century farmhouse
set amid well-designed gardens. But he has spent most
of the 30 years since he founded Comedia on the road:
lecturing, persuading, informing, researching, hustling
up work, spinning value from the thin air of original
thought. Working with all manner of public and private
enterprises — infrastructure providers, civic groups,
mall developers, and design firms — he has found many
novel ways to pursue his central quest of helping to
identify and develop the infrastructures that enable
creative people to put the best of what they imagine
into practice.
And so one year finds him taking up the post of
thinker in residence in Adelaide, Australia, helping the
city address the talent leakage that has traditionally
plagued it, by positioning itself as an incubator for inno-
vative ventures in the wine trade. The next year he’s
working with a Japanese retailer trying to inject a sense
of life into a massive new shopping and residential com-
plex in Seoul by attracting the sort of one-of-a-kind
shops that typically avoid such developments. Then
he’s on to Dubai to host a session aimed at bringing
together the highly compartmentalized baronies that
control life in that city-state, provoking controversy as
he demonstrates how the physical and civic infrastruc-
tures they have put in place are choking the possibility
of creative development.
Landry’s work is often identified with the creative
cities movement, which is perhaps best known through
the work of Richard Florida, a professor at the Uni-
versity of Tampa and author of The Rise of the Creative
Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure,
Community and Everyday Life (Basic Books, 2002). Yet
Landry differs from many colleagues in that field
because he defines creativity more broadly. Creative
cities proponents have tended to advocate strengthening
urban and regional centers by attracting artists, de-
signers, filmmakers, writers, and performers. The op-
erative assumption is that those groups constitute a kind
of advance guard whose mere presence acts as a spur
to enterprise.
Landry sees the focus on a specific “creative class” as
a manifestation of industrial-era thinking — an out-
dated, siloed approach to evaluating human assets that
misunderstands the comprehensive role talent plays in
today’s economy. He notes that creativity is needed at
every point in the value chain, because fast product
cycles and global competition vest ever-greater value in
innovation. He defines creativity as “imagination allied
features the creative mind
to tangible expression.” Imagination that remains unex-
pressed is sterile, he argues, while expression devoid of
imagination is lifeless and dull. And so instead of distin-
guishing specific professions or subgroups as creative, he
advocates cultivating conditions that enable people to
express imagination even in occupations that have tradi-
tionally been considered mundane.
Creative Bureaucracy
Landry’s conviction that creativity must be broadly
vested was influenced by Comedia’s involvement
throughout the 1980s in helping European cities such as
Helsinki and Glasgow reinvent themselves as cultural
centers. Glasgow, for example, had been known for its
rotting industrial base, desolate stretches of abandoned
6
housing, and persistent talent flight; then, in the late
1980s, it secured status as a European City of Culture,
an official E.U. designation. Comedia was hired to help
the city attract arts festivals, but Landry’s work on the
project convinced him that a vibrant entrepreneurial
base was the key to maintaining a sustainable cultural
environment. If this base were to develop, political and
commercial interests had to be engaged.
“Glasgow showed me that you can’t support cre-
ativity just by supporting creative professions,” Landry
says. “People in the arts provide content, of course, but
content is just one aspect of what makes a place attrac-
tive and prosperous. The right infrastructures are the
real key.” Landry notes that this kind of infrastructure is
rarely controlled by people who have what is conven-
tionally defined as creative talent. “If content is to have
any effect, you need creative logistics analysts, creative
 Charles Landry at his
home in the Cotswolds.

engineers, creative educators. Above all, you need cre-

ative bureaucrats.”
features the creative mind

Creative bureaucrats, in Landry’s lexicon, are high-

level functionaries skilled at countering rigidities in their
organizations and opening them up to more informa-
tion. They are thus important points in the infrastruc-
ture, performing the essential if unglamorous work of
distribution — and so reflecting Landry’s belief that
great content means little if it has no way to flow.
Although people tend to use the word bureaucracies in a
pejorative sense, they are necessary for coordinating effi-
cient action across complex systems. Landry points out
that bureaucracies have gotten a bad name because they
have a tendency to become self-reinforcing, reliant on
compartmentalized expertise and unable to accommo-
date fresh information. This rigidity can be broken up
only by creative individuals who know how to operate
7
inside the structure; finding ways to support them has
become one of Landry’s defining missions.
It’s ironic, given that his original impulse was to flee Games of 1988, for which the city, with great fanfare,
the legendary bureaucracies of Brussels, that Landry had built a handsome Olympic plaza at the heart of
should end up advocating for the potential of such sys- downtown, adjacent to a large Olympic park. Unlike,
tems, to the point where his work has become widely for example, Atlanta, which tore down most of its
associated with the phrase creative bureaucracy (it’s the Olympic facilities the minute the games were over,
name of a Comedia blog). He notes that he tends to Calgary wanted to use the large spaces so proudly erect-
gravitate toward concepts “that have a certain tension, ed at its symbolic heart to improve the quality of life in
seem paradoxical, give people a subtle jolt by confound- the city. To help it do so, the city hired Comedia.
ing expectations.” The paradoxical notion of creative Landry was asked to begin the project in what
bureaucracy came to him when he himself received a seemed to him a very bureaucratic way, by meeting with
strategy + business issue 60

subtle jolt while working on a project in Calgary.
Calgary is a big, diverse city that retains its frontier
flavor; above all, it is an oil town, subject to the booms
and busts of any resource economy. It first caught the
world’s attention with the hugely successful Winter
its director of bylaws. He says, “When the guy — his
name was Bill Bruce — showed up, he was wearing
a brown suit, and we were meeting in this restaurant
that also seemed very brown. I thought, this is going
to be incredibly boring. But the guy turned out to be

the most creative person in Calgary.”
Bruce had assumed his position some years before,
at a time when the city had 14 volumes of regulations,
rendering any decision making dauntingly complex. He
decided that at 62, he had little to lose if he ignored the
web of regulations. He began by inviting civic and busi-
ness leaders to articulate the city’s major objectives,
focusing on general principles rather than codified rules.
The result was a simple, commonsense list of intentions:
In general, we’re interested in less noise; in general, we
want less garbage; in general, we want people to use
alternative transportation.
Working from these principles, Bruce experimented
with hundreds of small-scale innovations involving
everything from bicycle bells to traffic routes. His goal
features the creative mind
8
was to assist people who wanted to solve civic problems
rather than imposing solutions on them. He especially
sought to involve citizens in decisions that affected
them directly, for example, by assisting the park patrol
along bike paths. One result of involving citizens in
decisions was that Calgary developed a creative and pro-
gressive tradition.
This tradition of citizen involvement proved useful
when Landry argued that paving over swaths of open
space in order to expand traffic would do nothing to
improve Calgary’s livability. His point of view, he says,
would have been “an easy sell in Toronto, but Calgary is
an oil town, a city full of engineers. It’s always going to
be partial to metrics and to solutions that look efficient
on paper.” And so Landry developed a process for cal-
 culating the economic costs of ugliness in terms of tal-
ent leakage, diminished quality of life, the discourage-
ment factor for local shops, even depression.
He says, “Rather than accept the idea that the
impact of ugliness or homogeneity can’t be measured,
we tried to figure the cost of not considering culture, cre-
ativity, and design in any given project — we called it
the asphalt currency.” And so attributes like beauty, ease
of access, flexibility of use, and the promotion of civic
involvement became criteria for developing the former
Olympic space into a rich landscape that provided park-
land, athletic fields, grounds for festivals and gatherings,
support for innovative local shops, and a hub for multi-
ple modes of transport that helped link the downtown
with the residential community.
Landry is pleased that the city has continued to take
aesthetics into account. He learned recently that one of
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the groups he worked with has been instrumental in an
effort to replace the dull and unsightly traffic bridge
adjacent to the parkland with a commission from archi-
tect Santiago Calatrava, known for designing the most
beautiful bridges in the world. “This is a sign of a
resource city being aspirational,” Landry says.
The city’s oil-town heritage is clearly being trans-
formed as the region seeks to expand its economy
beyond petroleum. Like Arab city-states with similar
goals, Calgary is recognizing the vital role that cultural
icons play in branding a region. But because of a net-
worked culture put in place by a creative bureaucrat, the
push to attract such icons does not necessarily need to
come from the top. The symbiosis between an active cit-
izenry and a bureaucracy able to accommodate new
9
ideas exemplifies the systemic creativity that Landry
seeks to promote.
What Makes a Hub
Landry believes that innovation flourishes in places and
in organizations that provide people with multiple
means of connecting. Just as the psychological state
known as flow heightens an individual’s ability to gener-
ate new ideas, so do infrastructures that facilitate flow
across boundaries enable people to bring forth new
products, ideas, and services. Since Calgary, Landry has
begun to evaluate the success of a given project in part
on the basis of how many new links or connections
within a community have been forged in the process of
working on the project.
He points to a highly successful venture in Mantua,
Italy, where he was charged with helping the city recap-
ture its sense of history and distinctiveness. Since the
town had ancient roots as a publishing center, Landry
advised the civic leaders to begin by supporting a series
of book festivals. Involving a wide network of people in
the effort resulted in an unusual number of entrepre-
neurial ventures linked to books, with the result that
Mantua has emerged as a center for quality book pub-
lishers, printers, designers, editors, and dealers. As a hub,
the town now serves as a place where people seeking to
establish themselves in the field can access a global net-
work of professionals who share their interest.
Becoming a hub for this industry has made Mantua
far more attractive to talent. Carol Coletta, president of
CEOs for Cities, notes that talented people today grav-
itate to places that they perceive to be hubs. Coletta
defines hubs — organizational as well as civic — as shar-
ing four key characteristics. They facilitate a robust tal-
ent churn, they offer tangible support for innovative
ventures, they provide the physical ground where people
can connect across divisions and cultures, and they offer
an undeniable sense of distinctiveness.
Landry’s work is aimed at augmenting each of these
characteristics, with a special emphasis on claiming dis-
tinction. “People don’t feel rooted — in an organization
or a region — unless they have a clear sense of what
makes it different,” he observes. This is the underlying
reason, he feels, that culture must play a defining role in
regions that are intent on drawing talent. Culture is a
richly symbolic means of establishing distinctiveness in
a complex interconnected system. It’s precisely the desire
for distinction that leads a city like Calgary to commis-
sion a Calatrava.
Of course, creative individuals have always grav-
itated toward hubs in search of sufficient scope to ex-
ercise their talents. Successful hubs historically have
been either great trading centers (London, Amsterdam,
Hong Kong, New York) or vibrant frontier outposts
(Sydney, San Francisco, Mumbai) that throw diverse
people together in an open market. By providing a
common ground for interactions that would never
occur in more bounded circumstances, hubs offer a
mechanism for generating, distributing, and leveraging
wealth in the service of fulfilling evolving forms of
human need. Although the primary market for many
strategy + business issue 60
enterprises has now moved into virtual space, people
still seek out physical harbors that they perceive will
support their ability to make connections, access
resources, and make a mark. As creativity becomes more
broadly vested, more and more contributors will seek to
 To sustain energy, urban hubs must attract
a broad mix of players: investors, entrepreneurs,
culture-makers, patrons, developers, researchers,
shoppers, support professionals, visitors.
establish their value in hubs.
Landry also notes that as the mainstream global
economy expands to include more cultures, more cul-
tural zones claim centrality by organizing around hubs.
This is why such cities as Shanghai, Guangzhou,
Mumbai, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sao Paolo gain ever
more importance in the global system, even as estab-
lished cultural centers such as New York, Moscow, Paris,
San Francisco, Frankfurt, and London remain viable
and vital. All these hubs dominate communications and
commerce within their cultural zones, and help inte-
grate smaller cities into the global system. Because their
importance serves a cultural role, Landry says, “They do
not increase their value by becoming more like other
hubs, but by emphasizing what is unique about them.”
But distinctiveness requires constant refinement. As
Landry points out, “Regions in the global economy
must constantly move higher on the value chain if they
are to remain economically attractive. A manufacturing
center such as Taiwan tries to move from mass pro-
duction to inventing goods and services that provide
a larger knowledge component. Oil producers in the
Middle East use sovereign wealth funds to invest oil
revenues in research centers so they can keep their best
people and develop their talents. Third-tier cities today
— Dubai is a good example — recognize they can’t
remain in place but need to keep honing their strength
as a travel and entertainment hub that links East and
West. A second-tier city, like Paris has become, knows it
must seek a higher rung or risk becoming a museum —
a great place to visit but of declining economic impor-
tance. A first-tier city like London has to constantly
maintain its edge or it will lose talent to places that offer
greater livability along with cultural power.” Although
this competitive jockeying can be reduced to caricature
in website lists of continually changing “cool places,” the
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imperative behind it reflects real concerns.
Landry maintains that hubs thrive when social and
physical infrastructures are fluid enough to support ex-
periment, serendipity, and invention; they decline when
infrastructures become rigid. Rigidity occurs when cul-
tural or legal restrictions hamper development (consider
the decline of New York shipping), when diverse popu-
lations are pushed out (think of African cities expelling
Indian traders in the 1970s and ’80s), or when the phys-
ical environment becomes so cumbersome that people
no longer wish to negotiate it (think of traffic in Cairo).
To sustain energy, urban hubs must attract a broad
mix of players: investors, entrepreneurs, culture-makers,
patrons, developers, researchers, shoppers, support pro-
fessionals, visitors. Hubs cannot flourish (nor can they
10
really be hubs) if they draw from a limited pool. This,
Landry believes, is why a creative class strategy often fails
to spur sustained development, as do master plans that
look to technology parks or giant shopping arenas to
inject economic juice.
The Basic Unit
But how is a physical infrastructure created? Where does
it start? For Landry it all starts with the street. I catch up
with him one morning in central London, where
he has come to preach to an eclectic mix of retailers,
company heads, cultural entrepreneurs, and city offi-
cials. The venue is a hard-to-find storefront gallery in
an elegant back alley filled with inviting shops and
pubs behind Old Bond Street, and the title of his talk is
“Reimagining Commerce, Reinventing the Commercial
Street.” Landry paces the floor as he delivers a steady
 Great talent magnet cities such as London, New York,
and Shanghai routinely come up short by livability
measures. But people flock to their streets.
stream of insights accompanied by spontaneous obser-
vations and philosophical asides, his lecturing style
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providing a demonstration of flow in action. He speaks
in a hushed, dramatic tone that compels attention, his
crisp British articulation infused with the excitement of
high purpose. His intellectual pyrotechnics are brought
down to earth by the homemade quality of his slides,
assembled from snapshots he takes in far-flung parts of
the globe.
The importance of the street is one of Landry’s great
passions. He sees it as the basic infrastructural unit, and
notes that people are drawn to (or repelled by) places
according to their physical, aesthetic, and emotional
experience of the street. The street is how we process
place, and it provides the image we carry with us. If we
think of ourselves in Rome, we see ourselves in the Via
Condotti — we don’t envision the abstract entity of
11
“Rome.” If we think of ourselves in Sydney, we remem-
ber the view of the Opera House as we walked along
George Street, the central artery that winds through the
Rocks. The street provides the central building block of
our place memory, reconciling a larger entity with the
scale of human perception.
And just as talent is drawn to hubs and the patterns
of links they enable, so are hubs in essence a great col-
lection of streets. For a hub to succeed at drawing the
best people and unleashing their talents, therefore, its
collection of streets must be aspirational, world-beating,
irresistible — a draw. London, he tells his audience, can-
not maintain its status in the first rank of the world’s
hubs unless it becomes more skillful and intentional
about managing and improving the experience that its
streets provide.
Landry recognizes that cyber-commerce is changing
how people buy their goods, expanding consumer
choice while reducing and homogenizing the experience
of transaction. Yet he insists this only makes it more
important that commercial streets provide a compelling
experience and also fulfill their traditional function of
bringing people together. If we feel at home in the
streets, we will feel at home in the local culture, and if
we feel at home in the culture, we will aspire to partici-
pate by investing our time or money in its precincts.
But what makes a street desirable? What makes peo-
ple feel culturally at home? What constitutes a positive
experience at the most basic unit of place? Landry
describes the three characteristics that distinguish great
collections of streets: distinction, variety, and flow.
Distinction means avoiding sameness, offering an
experience that cannot be had somewhere else. Most
places accomplish this by means of an iconography that
lets you know that here is not the same as there. This is
the problem with global brands, Landry says; although
the streets that welcome such brands may aspire to
exclusivity, the brands’ ubiquity undermines that princi-
ple. As soon as a great street like rue Saint-Honoré or
Calle de la Reina becomes colonized by global retailers,
people looking for an individual experience start to
avoid it. Sameness creates boredom, and a hub cannot
afford to be boring: It exists in order to stimulate.
Variety means creating a way for the small and large
to exist together, a well-known company next to a
quirky enterprise, a café alongside an art store adjoining
strategy + business issue 60
a market. Variety exists when an extraordinary, remark-
able destination is webbed within an ordinary, expected
urban environment. Zoning codes kill variety, Landry
reminds his listeners, as does the constant turnover
that results from a focus on maximizing rents; the
demise of a beloved institution will undermine every
business on the street.
Flow, the key concept of the hub, is also essential to
the street, being manifested in a particular and idiosyn-
cratic way. Flow results from giving people the ability to
control their pace and to stop at will to consider what
might be available. “This is what flow does not look
like!” Landry cries, showing a flurry of pictures taken
around the corner on Oxford Street, where a cavalcade
of signage supplemented by concrete barriers attempts
to direct pedestrians along a specific route. “People resist
directions that attempt to control their movements,” he
points out. “And the smarter they are, the more they
resent it. Urban engineers who come up with signage
like this are just trying to keep things moving. They
work from a traffic metaphor — the goal is to move peo-
ple along and out.”
Landry points out that some cities dominated by
old-line industries, such as Glasgow, Perth, and Boise,
have reinvented themselves in a dramatic fashion by
focusing on cultural strengths rooted in their own his-
torical uniqueness and by building on the distinctiveness
of their streets. Other regions can make this leap if they
stop focusing on generic livability indexes based on
quantitative measures, like the number of hospital beds
per resident or the frequency of trash pickup. He
explains that great talent magnet cities of the world —
London, New York, and Shanghai, for example — rou-
tinely come up short by these livability measures. But
they claim status as vital hubs because people flock to
their streets.
“Distinction, variety, and flow — these are the
physical manifestations of best talent practice,” Landry
declares, his voice dropping to a hush. “Any company or
region serious about talent must create infrastructures
that reflect these qualities. This is what’s required to sup-
port the evolution of knowledge-based global capital-
ism. You can’t control the system, you can only open it
up. The street provides the logical starting point.”
Landry’s consulting work is in great demand today,
as cities and regions compete for talent and dollars by
committing ever-greater resources to cultural and phys-
ical renewal. It’s significant that Landry’s first job out of
school in 1978 was to think about what Europe might
look like 30 years down the road, because today his
ideas are helping to shape Europe’s future. Cities such as
Copenhagen, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Barcelona —
global talent draws — have brought him in to share his
gospel of distinction, variety, and flow, and to find ways
to implement these concepts at the level of the street.
Smaller hubs such as Mantua and Savannah are apply-
ing his lessons about the cultural rewards of entrepre-
neurial efforts. By finding a way to address the future of
place that links wealth creation to culture, Landry has
features the creative mind
created a body of work with startling relevance for the
decades still to come. +
Reprint No. 10306
Resources
12
DeAnne Aguirre, Laird Post, and Sylvia Ann Hewlett, “The Talent
Innovation Imperative,” s+b, Autumn 2009, www.strategy-business.com/
article/09304: Why companies that compete on the global stage must, in
light of today’s changing workforce, rethink the way they manage people.
Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s
Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (Basic Books,
2002): How the creative ethos is increasingly dominating society, and how
it is changing everything from our values and tastes to our choices of
where to live.
Charles Landry, The Art of City-Making (Earthscan Publications, 2006):
An analysis, aided by international case studies, of how to reassess urban
potential so that cities can strengthen their identities and adapt to the
changing global terms of trade and mass migration.
Charles Landry, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (2nd ed.,
Earthscan Publications, 2008): Revised version of this influential text,
which shows how to think, plan, and act creatively in addressing urban
issues, with additional examples of innovation and regeneration from
around the world.
For more thought leadership on this topic, see the s+b website at:
www.strategy-business.com/global_perspective.
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